In order to increase the yield of packaging machines at high speed, it is customary to use two winders. Such a system makes it possible to reload the machine without slowing it down or stopping it by replacing an empty reel with a full reel while another reel is being unrolled and to automatically pass to the new reel when the preceding reel is empty. In the known systems, the driving of the winders is exclusively accomplished by the mere traction of the packaging material driven by two driving rollers. Since the reels of packaging material are relatively heavy, the winder and reel system offers a relatively high inertia at the start. The tension applied on the packaging material at the start, or each time the machine starts rolling in the case of a machine operated intermittently, is very high, and this prevents using a thin packaging material. In particular, the use of aluminum film with a 9 to 10 .mu. thickness, of which the tensile strength is insufficient to be subjected to such tensions, is impossible with such machines.
The present invention intends to overcome this drawback by designing a feeding system for a packaging machine, with a packaging material in the form of very thin strips, this supply being accomplished in a semiautomatic manner with a maximum of accuracy.